


i put my armor on (show you how strong i am)

by coffeebuddha



Series: rise up (ting ting) like glitter and gold [1]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, BAMF Women, Bechdel Test Pass, F/M, Families of Choice, Female Friendship, Found Family, Genderswap, Healthy Emotional Support Systems, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Latinx Kent Parson, Multi, Multilingual Kent Parson, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Secret Relationship, Women Being Awesome, Women in the NHL, always-a-girl Kent Parson, eventual additional relationships - Freeform, going public, it is a truth universally acknowledged, patater, that kent parson is in desperate want of a good Team Me, we don't talk about The Locker Room Incident of 2015
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-09
Updated: 2017-01-23
Packaged: 2018-08-30 02:25:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8515111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeebuddha/pseuds/coffeebuddha
Summary: Kent's on the taller side for a girl with a lot more muscle packed onto her frame than is fashionable, but she’s still so much smaller than the guys she plays with. She adapts: gets faster, gets creative, gets over the mentality that ‘girls should always be nice’ and isn’t afraid to get a little mean.(or a selection of related shorts from the life of female!Kent Victoria Parson)





	1. i'll do it 'til the sun goes down and all through the night time

**Author's Note:**

> This is a slightly more polished version of my feelings!explosion over female!Kent from [this post](http://coffeebuddha.tumblr.com/post/152912058797/coffeebuddha-ive-been-having-a-lot-of-feelings). There are several parts of this first chapter that I plan to expand on later, in addition to several other connected stories that I've either already started writing or am in the process of plotting out.
> 
> I'm in female!Kent Parson hell. Join me?
> 
> Title is taken from Sia's Unstoppable which is without a doubt female!Kent's theme song.

 

Kent’s entranced from her first slide out onto the ice, by the slick, cold feel of it under her feet and the way it gleams. She begs and pleads and her mom enrolls her in figure skating lessons. The lessons are right before peewee hockey and one day when her mom is late picking her up, the coach invites Kent to join in on practice while she waits. 

There’s no going back from there.

Kent's on the taller side for a girl with a lot more muscle packed onto her frame than is fashionable, but she’s still so much smaller than the guys she plays with. She adapts: gets faster, gets creative, gets over the mentality that ‘girls should always be nice’ and isn’t afraid to get a little mean.

There’s a lot of shit from parents and other players.

“What if someone checks her?”

Kent smirks, “You can’t check what you can’t catch.”

“She’s distracting the boys!”

Kent sneers, “Maybe if they were better at playing, they wouldn’t be so easily distracted.”

The older she gets, the better/worse it gets, but the pros outweigh the cons. The QMJHL drafts her and it feels like a free fall, fast and dizzy and out of control, and then she meets  _Jack_  and that free fall turns to flying. They’re made for each other, electric on the ice and easy off of it. He’s the best friend she’s ever had, one of the few guys who saw her skate and didn’t seem to care about her lack of dick, funny and a little snarky and a lot clever. 

She falls head over heels for his hockey, but Jack  _is_  his hockey. She never had a chance.

“You’re making history,” her agent tells her when whispers start up about her draft prospects. “You can’t write the story they tell, but you can control the information you give them to work with. Don’t be stupid.”

And Kent’s not stupid. She’s going to be more than ‘Jack Zimmermann’s girlfriend’. She’s going to be a  _legend_. 

She tells him she wants to keep things quiet and he agrees. They understand each other so well on the ice; it never occurs to her that they’re not on the same page here too.

Jack ODs and it feels like crashing back to earth.

He won’t take her calls or answer her texts. She flies to Quebec and Alicia meets her at the door.

Her eyes are sad and kind when she says, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but Jack’s not up for any visitors right now.”

Any visitors, like Kent is just  _anyone_. Like Jack isn’t her  _everything_ –hockey and whispered late night promises and secret touches that make her think in terms of decades that span far beyond their careers.

She smiles tightly.

Gives Alicia the care package she’d brought.

Gets back in the cab that’s still idling by the curb.

She doesn’t cry until she’s back in her hotel room, and the next day when she steps off her plane in New York, her make up is flawless and her media smile is in place and no one can see how red her eyes are behind her sunglasses.

Kent goes first in the draft.

* * *

She moves to Vegas and starts writing Jack letters; at least once a day, sometimes more. They’re filled with descriptions of practices and her teammates. She talks about the apartment she’s sharing with one of the WAGS while she looks for her own place and how much she thinks he’d like this one diner down the block from it.

(a couple times a week she ends up writing about how much she misses him, how much she loves him, how much she needs him here with her. she never sends those ones, though she can’t stand the thought of destroying them either, so they sit buried in the bottom of her sock drawer.)

She ends each letter with “I know you’re going to love it once you’re out here with me.”

Nearly two months in she gets her first reply.

All it says is “I’m not coming.”

* * *

Kent is used to focusing on hockey, so that’s what she does. She takes all of her anger and frustration and hurt and she pushes it down until it forms a tight, hot little ball in her belly that sends her hurtling through games like a demon.

She bounces back from checks and zips between other players so fast they have trouble keeping track of her. Her plays get more creative and her hockey gets meaner.

Hockey comes first, she tells herself, but in the back of her mind there’s always a quiet litany of ‘maybe if I'm faster, maybe if I’m stronger, maybe if I’m  _better_ , then maybe I could convince him to come play with me again.' She’s willing to work and wait for it, no matter now long it takes.

(she’s losing him.

she doesn’t lose, but she’s  _losing_  him.

she will. not. lose him.)

By the time the preseason is over, there’s a lot less talk from other players about her just being some kind of media stunt.

There’s a lot more talk about her being a bitch, but at least half of those comments seem to be colored with admiration and it’s nothing she hasn’t heard before.

She’ll take it.

* * *

Their first game of the regular season is a home game, and Kent’s roommate isn’t quite fast enough to keep her from seeing the sports page of the newspaper that talks about her being the team’s own personal Lady Luck, like she’s some kind of mascot.

Kent snorts and pushes down the anger, storing it away until she’s on the ice, where she lets it build and burn until she almost expects the rink to steam from the heat of it.

About ten minutes into the first period, someone tries to check her—because someone is always trying to check her. But then one of her boys is there, blocking his path, and she’s filled with a fierce, burning almost-maybe-probably-love for her team that translates into a gorgeous backhander that sails past the goalie.

Not too long after that she gets an assist.

When she scores her second goal of the night, someone up in the sound booth plays a clip of Ride of the Valkyries and she’s startled into a loud laugh that comes closer to knocking her down than any of the other team’s roughhousing has so far while the music swells into a dramatic crescendo.

They win the game 3-1 and the clip all the stations run is of Kent, sweaty and red faced and beaming from under the arm of one of her teammates, blowing kisses to the screaming fans in the stands.

* * *

The rest of the world is still spitting vitriol, but the Aces and Vegas love her.

She thinks maybe that should be enough.

It’s not.

She keeps writing unanswered letters. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! If you want to freak out about the idea of a female!Kent Parson--or freak out about my precious trash can son in general--feel free to follow [my tumblr](http://coffeebuddha.tumblr.com/).


	2. don't tell me it's not worth fighting for

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s  _you_ ,” the little girl breathes, clutching her glittery hockey-stick-shaped scepter to her chest.
> 
> or Kent's first Halloween as a Las Vegas Ace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from Bryan Adam's (Everything I Do) I Do It For You. Because I'm a fucking sap.

Kent’s first Halloween in the NHL is only a few weeks into the regular season. They're on a winning streak and Kent is pumped, wants to keep playing, keep scoring, keep proving that she's good enough. She's filled with a nearly feral urge to sink her teeth into the other teams and not let go until they admit defeat.

But they have four whole days off in a row without a game and they don't even have practice until tomorrow afternoon, so instead she bites into one of the full sized candy bars she'd picked up for tonight and snaps it in half.

It's not as satisfying as an NHL player, but objectively she has to admit that it's probably a hell of a lot tastier.

“You're being bloodthirsty again,” Nadia says mildly as she nudges the candy bowl just out of Kent's reach.

“I didn't even say anything,” Kent protests around a mouthful of chocolate and nougat and makes puppy eyes at her roommate until she begrudgingly hands over a Snickers.

“No, but you get this 'figuring out the best way to humiliate a man twice my size so badly that he'll wish he was dead' expression.” Nadia considers the candy bowl and selects a Reese’s for herself, then arches a perfectly groomed eyebrow at Kent. “It's not exactly subtle.”

Kent bares her teeth in a wide, probably very chocolatey smile and sings, “anything you can do, I can do better,” loudly and off key until Nadia's laughing and aiming balled up candy wrappers at her open mouth in an attempt to make her stop.

* * *

There are a good number of families in the apartment building, plus several other buildings around them, so they've prepared themselves for a good turnout. For the first hour or so a variety of kids show up in a slow trickle: ballerina, superhero, a few different professions, and in one weird instance a gumball machine. Nobody really seems to take note of Kent, focusing more on the candy in her hands than her face, and she starts to lose herself a little bit in the anonymity.

It’s something of a shock to open her apartment door still fairly early in the evening for a trick or treater and look down into the suddenly awestruck eyes of a little girl wearing her jersey, a tutu covered in aces, and a plastic tiara with a hockey puck glued to it.

“It’s  _you_ ,” the little girl breathes, clutching her glittery hockey-stick-shaped scepter to her chest.

Kent glances at the kid’s equally stunned looking parents, then drops to her knees so they’re on the same level when she grins and strikes a silly pose. “In the flesh! I’d say the one and only, but it looks like I have a little competition there.”

The girl’s name is Jane and she chatters nonstop for a good five minutes about Kent’s last game. Other trick or treaters are coming and going and Jane’s mom makes apologetic noises and goes to pull her away. Kent waves her off, instead pulling out her phone and slinging her arm around Jane’s tiny shoulders.

“This calls for a selfie,” she declares. “It’s not every day I get to meet a princess!”

They take several, including one with Kent wearing Jane’s tiara and Jane wearing a newly signed Aces cap, and when her parents finally tear her away, Kent gets a surprisingly tight hug around her neck and a slightly sticky kiss pressed to her cheek.

“I love you,” Jane whispers, and Kent swallows hard, suddenly having to blink back tears.

“You give those boys in your peewee league hell,” Kent says thickly, hold up a fist that Jane gleefully taps with her own small knuckles. “Don't _ever_ let them tell you that you can't play.”

* * *

Nadia takes over candy distribution for the next hour while Kent hides in her bedroom and breathes deeply, in and out, until the weight of her sudden realization of exactly what it is she’s set herself up to be stops feeling quite so crushing.

“Are you alright,” Nadia asks when Kent stumbles back out into living room. Kent feels shaky, like she's just been slammed into the boards except worse, and she doesn't even protest when Nadia mutes Hocus Pocus.

“I don't know.” She drops down onto the couch and lets Nadia take her hand. “It's just, that girl looks up to me. She wants to _be_ me.”

And it's not that Kent doesn't know that she has a legion of female fans, all counting on her to make a point for all of them, but it's never felt quite this personal before.

“Well,” Nadia says thoughtfully, “that's probably just because she hasn't seen you pour milk directly into a cereal box and isn't familiar with your lack of bathroom etiquette.”

“I'm serious,” Kent says, thumping their joined hands against Nadia's thigh. “What am I supposed to do? How do I live up to that!”

Nadia shrugs a little helplessly and pulls her closer into a one armed hug. “Just keep being Kent Parson. That seems to be doing plenty all on its own.”

Kent holds herself stiffly for a long moment, then slowly relaxes into Nadia's hold. “I just don't want to let her down,” she finally admits into the warm curve of Nadia's shoulder. “I've let too many people down already. I don't want to let her down too.”

“I can't promise you won't,” Nadia says after a silence that stretches a little longer than Kent is comfortable with. “We're human and we're imperfect and we fuck up.”

“Amen,” Kent mumbles, thinking of shaking hands and orange pill bottles and the wrong words that she should have known weren't right, no matter how much they'd seemed to be at the time.

Nadia presses a kiss to the top of her head. “That doesn't mean we stop trying.”

* * *

She gets the picture of her and Jane in their swapped headwear developed.

It gets a spot of honor in every place she lives, out in the open so that she’ll see it daily, a reminder of what her position really means.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! If you want to freak out about the idea of a female!Kent Parson--or freak out about my precious trash can son in general--feel free to follow [my tumblr](http://coffeebuddha.tumblr.com/).


	3. beauty is there but a beast is in the heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jesus Christ, Swoops thinks, someone save him from the rookies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from Hall and Oates' Maneater.

“So, um, the captain.”

Swoops sighs and doesn’t look up from where he’s taping his stick. It’s Yogi’s first season in the NHL and the rookie’s been following Kent around all through training camp like a lovelorn puppy. It doesn’t exactly take a genius to figure out where this is going.

He’s going to regret this, he knows he will, but, “What about her?”

Yogi fiddles with his gloves and actually scuffs the toe of his sneaker on the floor, like he’s not 6′5 and built like a brick shithouse. Jesus Christ, Swoops thinks, someone save him from the rookies.

“She’s not, you know, seeing anyone?”

She’s not. Yogi’s bright red and Swoops spares a moment to consider how hilarious it would be to set him up for the absolute epic shitstorm that would result if he asked Kent out. Instead he sighs, because  _someone_ should take pity on the kid and put him out of his misery in a nonlethal way.

“Parse doesn’t get involved with hockey players, Yogi. You know that.”

( _Everyone_ knows that. There have been so many interviews with so many reporters all asking about how she ‘handles the heat’ of sharing a locker room with so many male professional athletes. Kent mostly looks bored and unimpressed, tossing out some variation of, “I have zero interest in hockey players. If you’d seen what I’ve seen in those locker rooms, you’d know they’re not exactly a…huge temptation.”

Their PR coach chews her out after each of those interviews, but Kent just shrugs and tells her to find reporters who won’t ask such asinine questions.)

“Well, yeah,” Yogi says, a stubborn glimmer of hope still lurking in his eyes. “But there are always exceptions to rules?”

“Try it and I’ll slit your throat with my skates,” Kent says cheerfully as she passes behind him to her stall.

Yogi blanches.

(During a scrimmage at practice, Kent trips Yogi up so badly that he ends up slamming into the boards and comes away with a bloody nose. Kent smiles peacefully and glides away to score a particularly brutal point. If anything, it seems to make Yogi look at her with even  _more_  admiration, but he keeps his mouth shut and his hands to himself, so Swoops figures that probably ended about as well as could be expected.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! If you want to freak out about the idea of a female!Kent Parson--or freak out about my precious trash can son in general--feel free to follow [my tumblr](http://coffeebuddha.tumblr.com/).


	4. they will buy you and sell you for celebrity status

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You're a sports journalist,” she says blankly.
> 
> “Um,” the guy says. “Yes?”
> 
> “Then you should know that's a fucking stupid question.” 
> 
> (or Kent Parson vs the media)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from Marianas Trench's Celebrity Status.

Kent's not unfamiliar with dealing with journalists. She's had media training since she was fifteen and it became obvious that her hockey career wasn't going to slow down, might even snowball from the novelty 'oh look, a girl made it into the QMJHL' into something huge and groundbreaking. When someone asks her a stupid, sexist question, she knows how to brush it off and redirect the conversation back to hockey.

But here's the thing.

They're about a quarter of the way through her first season in the NHL and she's lost enough weight in the last couple of weeks that the team nutritionist has given her a bunch of protein shakes and a strict schedule for drinking them. They taste like ass, but she drinks them dutifully and is _still_ losing weight. She's already smaller than most of the guys, she can't afford to lose this much weight, this much muscle, and she's stressed out and angry and tired to her bones.

So when a journalist she vaguely recognizes from a couple of her post-game interviews corners her after morning skate and exclaims, “You've been looking really good lately, Parson! Any advice for fans who might be looking to drop a size or two,” all of Kent's ingrained PR training evaporates.

“You're a sports journalist,” she says blankly.

“Um,” the guy says. “Yes?”

“Then you should know that's a fucking stupid question.” She turns on her heel and stalks away while he's still sputtering behind her.

* * *

“Parson,” Meghan sighs, her forehead braced against the palm of her hand. “You can't just go around calling the media 'fucking stupid'.”

Kent props her feet up on Meghan's desk and crosses them at the ankle. It's not like she can make their head of PR any more annoyed with her right now. “Technically,” she muses, “I called his question 'fucking stupid'. Not him.” She pauses. “Though considering he asked it, I'd guess he is.”

“ _Parson_ ,” Meghan repeats. She makes a show of shaking a couple of tums out of the huge bottle on her desk and pops them in her mouth. After she's swallowed, she shoves Kent's feet off her desk. “Please just try to play nice?”

Kent's mother had asked her the same thing when she'd been thirteen and had dropped gloves for the first time. Her answer now is the same as it was then: she shrugs.

Meghan eats another tums.

* * *

“So, Parson, do you ever get tempted to sneak a little peak when you're in the locker room?”

Kent, who had been in the middle of praising a power play that Swoops and Horsey had pulled off in the second quarter, stumbles to a stop mid word and slowly turns to look at the reporter who'd interrupted her.

“At _what_?” she asks, unable to keep her dismay from coloring her tone.

The reporter opens and closes his mouth a couple of times; the other interviewers are staring at him now too, along with most of the players in the locker room. He doesn't seem to grasp just how far he's overstepped, though, because he chokes out an awkward laugh and waggles his eyebrows at her.

“You know. At your teammates', ahem, equipment.”

Kent closes her eyes and counts slowly to ten in Spanish, then back down to one in French.

The room is still oddly quiet when she opens her eyes again and tells him in a flat, even voice, “No, I'm a professional.” She pauses, then adds, “Maybe you should consider trying it sometime.”

She ignores the red that's flushing up his neck to his cheeks and his attempt at a follow up question. Another reporter looks between the two of them, then hazards a comment about the first quarter.

Kent flashes her best smile at him and happily starts talking about how she couldn't have made that point without Brownie's assist.

* * *

“Kent,” Meghan sighs.

Kent crosses her arms over her chest and looks away.

“At least you didn't curse at him,” Meghan concedes and tosses a Hersey's kiss at Kent's head.

* * *

“Do you have a game plan for when you decide to have kids?”

“No,” Kent says. “Right now I'm more focused on my game plan for stopping on the way home to grab a hamburger.”

Over the reporter's shoulder, she locks eyes with Horsey and tips her chin up a fraction of an inch in invitation.

“But if you want to talk babies with someone, Horsey actually has a newborn at home.”

Horsey slings his arm around the reporter's shoulder and leans in hard enough that the smaller man staggers under his bulk. He grins at Kent, then shoves his phone in the reporter's face. “Dude, we go through _so many diapers_. Look at this one. All the kid eats is milk. How does milk even come out that color?”

* * *

“Hamburgers aren't on your meal plan,” Meghan says, though it doesn't hold much weight since she and Kent are currently splitting a Twix.

“I'm still having trouble maintaining my weight,” Kent points out. “I think I'll be okay with the occasional cheat.”

Meghan hums in agreement and tips her chair onto its back two legs. “How many pictures of dirty diapers did Troy make the guy look at before he escaped?”

Kent cackles. “ _All_ of them.”

* * *

“If you could sit down and have a nice dinner with another pro athlete, who would you choose?”

At that one, Kent actually perks up. She's smiling and bouncing a little when she says, “Serena Williams, she's an icon and she doesn't take shit from anyone. I love her.”

The reporter looks flabbergasted and he makes a sound like he's choking before he asks, “Is this. Are you coming out?”

Kent rolls her eyes toward the ceiling and says, “And you were doing so well,” before walking away toward a clump of fans who have been waiting with merch for her to sign.

“Do you think David Beckham would take me out for a steak,” she hears Swoops wonder loudly behind her.

“Nah,” Poots chimes in. “But maybe he pity date if you pay for own dinner.”

“Fuck you, Beckham would totally be in to me. Look at my ass!”

“Your _face_ is look like ass!”

Kent bites back a smile and keeps walking.

* * *

“So,” Meghan says as she swirls her straw through the frappuccino Kent had brought her.

Kent slurps obnoxiously at her own drink. “Yeah?”

“Serena Williams' agent called. She's going to be in town next week. Are you still interested in that dinner?”

Kent inhales her frap and nearly ends up shooting it out her nose, and the resulting flailing ends with her chair overturned, her shirt covered in icy coffee, and Meghan's eyebrow doing that super judgy thing, but her shrieked, “YES,” is loud enough that they hear her all the way out on the ice.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! If you want to freak out about the idea of a female!Kent Parson--or freak out about my precious trash can son in general--feel free to follow [my tumblr](http://coffeebuddha.tumblr.com/).


	5. left the bloodstains on the carpet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not like Kent’s body shy. In Juniors she was always sequestered away in her own little bathroom before and after games to shower and change, but now she shares a locker room with her team mates and it’s just not really an issue. There’s a privacy curtain around the shower stall that she uses and that’s about it.
> 
> They're professional adults, and it's not like she's wandering around completely naked, like most of them seem to. She wears a sports bra or pulls a long shirt on over her towel before dropping it. The guys can deal with it or they can’t, but either way she figures it’s not actually her problem if they’re not mature enough to keep their eyes to themselves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **SEE BOTTOM NOTES FOR WARNINGS!**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Title taken from Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal.
> 
> Translations for the French are provided in mouseovers.

It's not like Kent’s body shy. In Juniors she was always sequestered away in her own little bathroom before and after games to shower and change, but now she shares a locker room with her team mates and it’s just not really an issue. There’s a privacy curtain around the shower stall that she uses and that’s about it.

They're professional adults, and it's not like she's wandering around completely naked, like most of them seem to. She wears a sports bra or pulls a long shirt on over her towel before dropping it. The guys can deal with it or they can’t, but either way she figures it’s not actually her problem if they’re not mature enough to keep their eyes to themselves.

* * *

Some of them aren't. Some of them take it as an invitation. Some of them make it her problem.

Roberts is one of their wingers; he's been on the team a couple years, and he's good, obviously, though not particularly noteworthy. He has a slick, oily smile and mean eyes, but Kent's a cocky eighteen and confident in her ability to hold her own and she doesn't think anything of it when he asks to talk to her alone.

He gets a palm over her mouth and there's nothing in the way he looks at her except pure loathing. She's struggling for leverage against his thigh between her legs, his fingers punishingly tight around her wrists, when Poots stumbles across them and rips Roberts away from her. Kent sags against the wall, and then there's blood on the Roberts' face, blood on the floor, blood on Poots' knuckles, and when Kent looks down at her hands, there's blood under her fingernails. She feels very distant from herself as she studies the red half crescents, vaguely aware of Poots spitting out something vicious in Russian that doesn't need translating judging by the way Roberts runs.

Poots turns back to her and his expression shifts into something that's caught somewhere between concern and horror.

“Parser?” he asks softly. Then, “Kent? Tell what I can do?”

When Kent just stays where she is, propped up against the wall, he takes a careful step forward, palms lifted and fingers spread like he's trying not to spook a skittish animal. The thought makes a hysterical, wet laugh bubble up out of her, and that's when she starts to cry. He drapes his windbreaker around her shoulders, careful not to touch her, and Kent clutches it closed over her torn shirt with one hand and slips her other one into Poots'.

He sits with her while she shakes and shakes and shakes, quiet until the tremors begin to ease, then gently guides her through the halls to their coach's office.

Management calls what happened an Unfortunate Incident. They talk about her career and scandal and how her reputation is on the line, and she's filled to overflowing with humiliation and rage, but she lets them talk her out of pressing charges.

* * *

It's late by the time she gets out of what feels like an endless stream of meetings, and she wants to be annoyed to see Poots waiting in the hallway when she steps out of the boardroom, but mostly it feels like being on the ice and knowing the huge d-man has her back.

He's scrolling through something on his phone, but he looks up sharply when the door opens. Jackson, one of the team's lawyers, nearly bumps into Kent when she pauses.

“Pudovkin?” Jackson asks. “What are you still doing here?”

Poots pushes away from the wall with a roll of his shoulders and says, “I wait for Kent,” like that explains everything. Which, honestly, when he holds up his car keys and tilts his head in invitation, it kind of does.

“Yeah, okay,” Kent says, because Poots' eyes are sad and kind and very, very blue. Kent has no defense against eyes that shade of blue.

She falls into step beside him, lets him keep a careful six inches of space between them, and ignores management when they try to call her back for 'one last thing, Parson!'

The drive is quiet; Poots has been to her apartment a few times to watch games or play video games, so she doesn't even need to give directions. Her fingers twitch toward the radio dial a few times, but she twists them together in her lap and presses her hands hard against her thighs.

There's still blood under her fingernails. She picks at it, methodically scraping it out from under each nail with her thumbnail.

She only stops when Poots touches careful fingertips to the back of her wrist, and when she looks up, the car's in park and they're at her apartment building.

“Kent,” Poots says slowly, expression screwed up like he's trying to translate something into English, but can't quite find the words.

Kent shakes her head sharply, one quick jerk back and forth. “I'm okay,” she tells him, though her eyes slide away to the side. “I was dumb. I shouldn't have-”

“No!” Poots is loud enough, angry enough, that Kent flinches back before she can clamp down on the reaction, and his shoulders immediately fold inward in contrition. “No,” he says again, quieter this time. “You good, Kent. Roberts is shit, we make sorry, but you? You best. Not your fault.”

“You don't have to make him sorry. This is my issue, okay?”

His hand on hers is gentle, the same kind of featherlight touch he'd bestowed on his infant daughter when his wife had picked him up from practice a couple weeks ago. It makes something twist painfully in Kent's chest, threatening to rise up in her throat and choke her when Poots ducks to meet her eyes and says, “We are team. Whatever happen, we have your back. That is what team mean. You not have to handle this _alone._ ”

Kent swallows around the lump in her throat and croaks out a hoarse, “Okay.” When Poots gives her a skeptical look, she manages a shaky but sincere smile. “Okay, Viktor.”

* * *

Nadia has a show tonight, so the apartment's dark and empty when Kent lets herself inside. She heats water for tea on autopilot, leaving it to steep while she steps into the shower.

The tea's lukewarm by the time she gets back to it, but she sips at it anyway.

She's wrapped herself up in an old, ratty flannel bathrobe that she'd stolen from Jack back in Juniors. There's a poorly patched hole in the shoulder and the sleeves swallow her hands entirely, but when she turns her face into the collar, she imagines that she can still breathe in something of Jack that's been worn down into the seams. It's comforting, less conspicuous than a blanket would be, and some of the tension in her eases when she tucks the hem over her toes.

Poots' words are still turning over in her head, and she thumbs through her contacts on her phone as she forces herself to finish her tea.

It's even harder than she expected to make herself hit 'call', but then the phone's ringing and she's torn between hoping no one answers and that someone does.

“Allo?”

His voice is achingly familiar, even after so many months of radio silence, and Kent closes her eyes for a moment against a tidal wave of memories.

“Allo,” she says, her voice cracking like black ice despite her efforts to keep it steady.

There's a long, heavy silence on the other end of the phone, before an almost gentle, “Kent? Est-ce vous? Est-ce que tu vas bien?”

“Oui,” Kent says. Then, “Non. Non, Bob, pas du tout.”

Bob's quiet, the way he is when he's giving other people space to be uncomfortable, and Kent knew she's been missing Jack, but she hadn't realized that she misses his parents and their easy kindness as well. She forces herself to take a deep breath, then another, and makes herself think through what she wants to say in Québécois. Bob would speak to her in English, she knows that, but her French is just rusty enough that she has to focus on the words, deliberately work not to slip and slide into Spanish when the similarities come a little too close, and there's something about the extra effort that makes it a little easier to focus on why exactly she's calling; what she's planning to ask for.

“Je sais que les choses ont été difficiles et que nos situations ont changé, mais vous m'avez dit une fois que, si jamais j'avais besoin de votre aide, je pourrais vous appeler. Puis. Puis-je encore?”

“Bien sûr vous pouvez.” His answer this time is gratifyingly quick. Kent nods, even though she knows he can't see it, and curls tighter into Jack's robe.

“Vous êtes amis avec Commissioner Bettman. Oui?” At Bob's affirmative noise, Kent steels her nerves and tucks her head a little deeper into her collar. “Quelque chose de mauvais s'est passé aujourd'hui. Quelque chose de vraiment mauvais. Voudriez-vous." She presses her thumb against the bruises that are already starting to darken around her wrist and pushes through the burn of embarrassment and shame. "Would you drop gloves for me, Bob?”

* * *

Roberts disappears. He's not traded, he's just gone from the team, gone from the _league_ , and Kent doesn't think she imagines that some of the guys look at her like it's her fault.

It's not, she tells herself. That sort of shit will never be her fault. It's their problem, not hers.

(Swoops, Brownie, and Poots start some kind of unofficial rotation for shadowing her, like some sort of fucked up honor guard, and Kent hates it. She _hates it._

She doesn't ask them to stop.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Kent is sexually assaulted by a teammate. It's nongraphic, but management handles it badly and essentially tries to guilt Kent into keeping quiet.
> 
> I struggled with this chapter. Like, a LOT. But I feel like this is something that I needed to address considering the toxic masculinity that's embedded in sports culture. Kent's assault in this chapter is 100% about power, about a man trying to 'put her in her place'. Her place is in the NHL and his place is burning in a pit of lava a la Anakin Skywalker.
> 
> Next chapter will be much happier! Tater and Kit will both show up! Kit is a kitten and Tater is awkward! There's a dumpster and Kent in a pretty dress! *confetti*
> 
> If you're wondering about why I keep referencing Kent speaking Spanish, you can read a little bit more about my personal head canons for her family background in [this post](http://coffeebuddha.tumblr.com/post/153455274287/randomness-from-my-femalekent-au). For extra fun, it has visual aides for how I picture female!Kent!
> 
>  **12/19/16 UPDATE:** My laptop died and so far I've had zero luck either reviving it or recovering anything from it. I'm still holding out hope, but one of the things I lost was about 6k of this AU. Please be patient with me while I mourn the loss of all those words and work on rewriting them. Additionally, it's looking more and more like what was going to be the next chapter is going to end up being posted as its own story due to length. So I guess this is going to become a series?  
>  (Although, tbh, I'm kind of considering taking all of these shorts and the plans I have for other ones and rolling them into a much bigger, longer full length fic. We'll see how it goes.)


	6. rain reversing into clouds of gold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After three and a half years Kent has a pretty firm grasp on what she and Alexei can and can’t get away with in public while keeping everyone else in the dark. This probably crosses a line or ten, but Kent’s past caring. She lifts her free arm, fingers outstretched, and that’s all the invitation Alexei needs to scramble over the boards and slip and slide across the ice to her side. Her teammates know about them--that ship had sailed with the Locker Room Incident of 2015--and they part easily for him.
> 
> (Or in which the Aces win the Cup and Kent claims her man.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For shearsys, who is always up for my female!Kent ramblings and is keeping me from making a fool of myself over hockey details. <3
> 
> Title is taken from SVRCINA's Burning Heart.

The last thirty seconds of the game pass in a blur. Kent’s lungs are burning, her legs feel rubbery, and it’s only adrenaline that’s keeping her on her feet at this point, but they’re fighting it out for the fucking Stanley Cup, tied in overtime, and there’s not a force on earth that could keep her off the ice for this.

She’s got the puck and it’s _hers_. The puck, the game, the cup, they are all _hers_. Or nearly hers, at least, because no matter what she does she can’t get past the other team. She’s smaller and faster, and normally that’s where her edge comes into play, but they’re wise to her tricks and she’s tired. Kent can admit that she’s tired, bone deep, straight down to the ground that she wants to take a nap on.

It drags on her so that it feels like she’s moving through molasses. Probably her only saving grace at this point is that everyone else seems just as tired, burning on sheer determination.

But then there’s an opening and she can see Swoops, who is incredibly, beautifully open.

His eyes connect with hers and she’s never loved the fucker more than she does in the split second where she feints right and snaps the puck left between another player’s legs and straight to his stick. But she can love him more and does when he takes advantage of everyone still focusing on her and takes the shot.

The goal horn goes off and that’s all she wrote.

The Aces win the Cup.

* * *

It’s the third time in her life that Kent’s hefted the Cup like this, the lightest thirty-four and a half pounds she’s ever lifted, and the cheering faces in the stands are a blur as she whips her way around the rink for her victory lap. Her boys are there in the corner of her eye, huddled together on the ice in a shouting, exuberant mass. When her lap is up, she lets their yells call her back home into their arms. There are hands on her hips and her waist, and before she can even pretend to protest, they’re lifting her up, up, up, too high and not nearly high enough. Kent’s holding the Cup, but her boys are holding her; she falls backwards into their grasp, because who can she trust if not these glorious assholes?

Swoops’ voice is in her ear as the entire mess of them shuffle in place around center ice. She can’t make out his words over the din of the crowd, but he sounds exhilarated.

Damn straight he does; Kent would be personally offended if he wasn’t after that final play.

“You’re a beautiful motherfucker,” Kent twists around to shout in his face and he laughs in hers. “I fucking love you!”

“Love you too, jackass,” Swoops yells back, and she finally relinquishes the Cup to him so that he can take his own lap. Kent’s laughing so hard when her feet hit the ice that it’s only the press of bodies around her that keep her upright.

* * *

Coach Eason is shouting in her ear about next season--because the man is genetically wired to be incapable of chilling long enough to properly celebrate--while the last couple of trainers take their turns lifting the Cup, and Kent is doing a pretty damn good job of smiling, nodding, and pretending like she’s listening. She’d feel worse about clocking out if she didn’t know she’ll probably have an email outlining everything he’s saying in her inbox by the time she makes it back to her hotel tonight.

But then someone gives the signal and if she’d thought it was bedlam before, it’s nothing like it is now with everyone’s families flooding the ice.

The Cup gets pushed back into her hands, and Kent hams it up for the camera that she knows is turned on her, smacking a kiss to the base before lifting it high and shouting, “To Lord Stanley!”

“Lord Stanley,” her boys echo back, and Kent can’t bring herself to let go of the trophy entirely, but she swings the butt of it Swoops’ way so that they can hold it up together for a photo op.

Kent’s mom wasn’t able to make it because of a court date--”Judges don’t typically accept ‘my daughter had a hockey game’ as an excuse for the public defender not showing up, mija, no matter how big the game is.”--but it’s impossible to feel alone. Nadia’s on Swoops’ other side, somehow steady on the ice despite the huge swell of her third trimester belly, and they grin at each other for a moment before Swoops steals Nadia’s attention back with a kiss.

There’s still some straggling confetti lazily raining down on them. Kent tips her head back to feel the cool whisper of it against her flushed face. When she opens her eyes and looks up again, her eyes land on Alexei, as if drawn to him by a magnet. He’s still on the wrong side of the boards and things are almost perfect, but they’d be even better if he was here with her.

They’ve been so quiet and so careful about keeping their relationship out of the media to save her that additional hassle, and after three and a half years Kent has a pretty firm grasp on what they can and can’t get away with in public while keeping everyone else in the dark. This probably crosses a line or ten, but Kent’s past caring. She lifts her free arm, fingers outstretched, and that’s all the invitation Alexei needs to scramble over the boards and slip and slide across the ice to her side. Her teammates know about them--that ship had sailed with the Locker Room Incident of 2015--and they part easily for him.

Then he’s there, an arm curling automatically around her waist while hers settles over his shoulders. Like this, with him in sneakers and her in skates, she’s only a few inches shorter than he is and the stretch is more manageable than usual.

Alexei leans closer and she can just feel the brush of his lips against her temple when he yells, “Это моя девочка!”

He’s grinning when he leans back, genuinely happy for her in a way she isn’t entirely certain she’d be able to be for him if their positions were reversed. When he plucks a piece of confetti from her braid, Kent is struck by how vivid the purple and blue strands are against his fingers and by the knowledge that the colors would be significantly duller if he hadn’t sat in their hotel room and helped her touch up her faded playoff dye job the night before.

And fuck, Kent thinks. She fucking _loves_ him. More than Swoops, more than the Cup, more than probably anything else in her life, and she’s happy they’ve been quiet, because it’s been nice having something that’s just for them, but in that moment she thinks that there’s a time and place for quiet.

Her third Cup win is not it.

He’s everything, and Kent knows she could win without him, because she’s done it twice, but it’s never been as good as this time right now.

She slides her hand up to cup the back of his neck, her fingers tangling in the short curls there, and shakes him a little as she yells, “I love you!”

Alexei smiles, that familiar almost startled one that seems to be an involuntary reaction to her saying those words, as if he still can’t quite believe they’ve made it here. “I love _you_!”

Fuck it, Kent decides.

So much of today has been a struggle, a tooth and nail fight to get what she wants, but this? This is so, so easy.

When she turns her head, the Cup is right there and the metal’s cold when she closes the distance to kiss it, a long, chaste press of lips.

And then all she has to do is turn back to Alexei, and a tug on his neck brings him close enough that it’s nothing to tilt her face up to meet his and trade the chill of the Cup for the warmth of his smile as flashbulbs explode like fireworks all around them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and for your patience with the long wait between updates! Please note that this is officially a series now, because there are a couple of stories I'm working on for it that too long for me to comfortably include in a collection of what are supposed to be shorts.
> 
> If you want to freak out about the idea of a female!Kent Parson--or freak out about my precious trash can son in general--feel free to follow [my tumblr](http://coffeebuddha.tumblr.com/).


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